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Monday, July 31, 2006

Zheia Bateool, age 2, is released from a hospital in Lebanon after she was treated for burns and shrapnel wounds suffered when her family home was bombed by Israelis.

"The perception that Israel has lost the battle for hearts and minds, and that Hezbollah and Iran have won, was reinforced by the Israeli attack on the Lebanese village of Qana, which killed dozens of civilians, including many children."

— Michael Slackman, New York Times, Aug. 1, 2006

The Qana Tipping Point

Jefferson Morely, Washington Post, Aug. 1, 2006

The Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana early Sunday morning did more than kill 57 civilians. According to a wide range of commentary in the international media, it inflamed already boiling public opinion in the Arab world against Israel, undermined what little support the United States has among the Lebanese people, and illuminated the continuing inability of Israel and the United States to achieve their goal of decisively weakening Hezbollah.On Monday, the leading English-language news sites in the Arab world -- including Aljazeera.net, the Jordan Times, the Beirut "Daily Star," and the Arab News -- featured photos of rescue workers carrying the dusty bodies of children from the wreckage of a Qana apartment building where they had taken refuge. The headlines were blunt: "Israel Massacres Kids," said the Arab News in Saudi Arabia. The Qana attack wiped out concerns in the Sunni Arab world, voiced early in the conflict, about Hezbollah and its allies in Shiite Iran.The Daily Star and many other sites emphasized a historical angle that most Americans were probably unaware of: that Qana had been the site of an unprovoked Israeli attack on a refugee camp in 1996 that killed 106 civilians. "The Israeli butchers have added a new line to their bloody record," said Al Ahram, the leading daily newspaper of Egypt whose editor is appointed by the country's pro-American leader Hosni Mubarak. "This dark chapter resembles the one that took place ten years ago. The place is the same... the butchers are the same and the victims again are innocent children and women."Almost ninety percent of all respondents agreed that the United States “is not an honest mediator” in the Middle East. The Bush administration has said that its goal is bolster Lebanese democracy. The vast majority of Lebanese don’t believe it...Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper said July 31 that the Qana massacre has boosted support for Hezbollah. “Now that fresh images of the broken bodies of the women and children of Qana are being shown on our television screens, the idea of forgetting has become all the more unthinkable. These images have stirred the anger and outrage of even the most moderate Lebanese, proving that Israeli brutality - not Hizbullah - has become Israel's own worst enemy. Israel's unabashed butchery in Qana has only demonstrated to many of those who were on the fence that there is indeed a legitimate need for resistance.”***LETTER TO THE EDITOROn Jul 31, 2006, at 21:11, B.F. wrote: Re: "Israel has lost the battle for hearts and minds."This has truly been my experience. The information gathering efforts of so many people on the internet has been stellar. May God bless them all, and most especially yourself. Any sincere person with half a brain could piece the story together from the information available. And as you say, many people are tracing the pathology back to it's source in rabbinic Judaism, which is a very positive development. From the work I've been doing on internet forums it's obvious that the big guns of Zionist apologetics are sitting this one out. It has been a great window of opportunity to get the message out in places where I'm certain that I would have been tarred, feathered and then lit on fire before being banned from the forum at any other time.It's a small triumph, and sadly it came at the expense of the suffering of an entire nation, but it's a triumph nonetheless. As one who always attempts to keep a level head, I wonder, what do we make of it all?I am of the opinion that at some point Zionists are going to attempt to create anti-"Jewish" sentiments on a much greater scale as a means of drawing the more liberated Judaics into the fold. Could that be related to what's happening here?Sincerely, B.F.

HOFFMAN REPLIES:

Yes, I agree, the Israelis may generate their own atrocity sympathy through black ops.Second, they commit crimes and massacres in Lebanon based in part on psychological and other studies that determine that the carnage will be but a hazy memory a year from now.The April, 1996 Israeli massacre at Qana, which according to Amnesty International was deliberate and unprovoked, was described by both the NY Times (Steve Erlanger) and the LA Times yesterday, July 31, as having been an accident. There is no price to pay for this holocaust denial on the part of the these major newspapers. Even if the blame were pinned squarely and deservedly on the Israelis by the US media, Qana '96 has not been indelibly memorialized in any way: no monumental statue, no annual commemoration, no documentary movie with interviews with the survivors; no stirring song, renowned poem or gripping theatre to enshrine it for all time. Furthermore, Beirut was horribly firebombed throughout the summer of 1982 by the Israelis, including schools and hospitals. No one remembers it today, not even the victims. The Arab memory for 1982 is mainly of the September massacre at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp, not the city of Beirut (particularly in August) under Israeli terror-bombing.Whenever the bombs stop falling in Lebanon, the world will turn its eye to some other disaster zone, perhaps in Asia or America's own hurricane alley. At that point it will be up to the Arabs to kindle the memory of what transpired in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Let's hope they change their apathetic, amnesiac ways, otherwise, as time progresses, the memory of Israeli war crimes will recede, as it always has, even as the memory of what the Nazis did to Judaics (real and imagined) more than 60 years ago, becomes, by some perverse wizardry, ever more vibrant and compelling.This is the psychology which the White House and Jerusalem are banking on to extricate themselves over the long term. Yes, I believe the Israelis are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the short-term. But in the long view, this loss is by no means certain, as yet.

Images of children’s bodies tangled in the building’s ruins, being carried away on blankets or wrapped in plastic sheeting were aired on Arab news networks. The televised images of stiffened, dust-covered bodies of children being pulled from the wreckage spread rage. In Qana, Khalil Shalhoub was helping pull out the dead until he saw his brother’s body taken out on a stretcher. “Why are they killing us? What have we done?” he screamed.Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, demanded an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, warning the Muslim world will “not forgive” nations that stand in the way of stopping the Israeli bombing. Headlines of “Carnage’’ and “Barbaric’’ filled the front pages of newspapers across the Arab world July 31, and a member of the parliament of Kuwait, a staunch ally of the United States, called American policy makers “sons of dogs’’ for supplying the bombs for the Israeli attacks, news services said. The European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, issued a statement saying that “nothing can justify” the Qana "airstrike."Nearly 550 Lebanese civilians have been killed in Israeli attacks, with as many as 200 more missing, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. Nearly 2,000 have been wounded, the ministry said. Israel apologized for the deaths in Qana but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas. The Israeli defense chief, Amir Peretz said, “An Israeli pilot has never been given an order to hurt civilians.”

"Nazi Holocaust" propaganda has dulled the sensibilities of the world to holocausts against Arabs

Today we awaken to the dreadful news, according to the Associated Press, that the Israelis bombed several homes in the southern Lebanon village of Qana early Sunday, "killing at least 56 people, most of them children, in the deadliest attack in 19 days...." Even Jack Straw, the former British Foreign Secretary, said of the Israeli attacks: "These are not surgical strikes, but have instead caused death and misery among innocent civilians."This is the second Israeli mass murder at Qana. In April, 1996, Israelis murdered 102 Arab civilian refugees at a United Nations camp in Qana. An Amnesty International report described the Israeli attack as deliberate. The July 31, 2006 New York Times describes the 1996 slaughter in accordance with the official Israeli military account, as a case of the Israelis having "mistakenly shelled a United Nations post in Qana..." LinkThe Israeli holocaust against Lebanon continues, while the world does nothing. Ever more Arab women and children in Lebanon are murdered with impunity. They are less than human in the eyes of the West. Nothing like this would ever be permitted if it were Judaic children who were dying. In such a case, the words, "The Holocaust is happening again, the world must not stand by silent!" would reverberate from every pulpit, radio, TV and newspaper front page in America. But since it is the children of Lebanon who are being killed, "sub-human Amalekites" according to the secret teaching of the Orthodox rabbis, the US obstructs a ceasefire, with help from American journalists, editors, clergymen and the US Congress.This is a shame, and a disgrace. It proves that the perpetual, pious human rights tears shed over the "Nazi Holocaust against the Jews" in schools, churches and national museums and memorials day-in-and-day out, have nothing to do with ensuring that it "never happens again" to "any other people." Rather, "The Holocaust" is a cynical power-politics hammer used to build special privileges and a sense of sacred awe and racial superiority for Judaics, which in turn renders them forever immune from war crimes prosecutions, or any interdiction of the holocausts which they perpetrate against Palestine and Lebanon.If "The Holocaust" was a true human rights lobby for all mankind, then Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt and Steven Spielberg would be using their clout and prestige to demand an immediate end to Israeli mass murder in Lebanon.Instead, Wiesel is on record supporting Israeli bombing in Lebanon, while the vast majority of the Israeli people, including the "Holocaust Survivors" among them, also endorse it. "Holocaust" propaganda has dulled the moral sense of the West. The "Holocaust" is little more than an arm of Zionist psychological warfare for the maintenance of Judaic superiority, racial and ethical, throughout the earth, not for saving the lives of other marginalized peoples. In fact, it seems to have given the Israelis a hubris as supra-human ethicists with a license to kill civilians without moral qualms or the least fear of war crime prosecution. No doubt the movie Spielberg will make about what is happening in Lebanon, will show Israeli commanders and troops agonizing about their bombings. But in reality there are no such reservations, just exultation and the arrogance of stone-cold killers swaggering in the knowledge that their murder spree is backed by US super-power money and might. (The Israelis are not so brave when they have to confront Hezbollah militiamen on the ground, man-to-man, rather than from 30,000 feet up in the cockpit of a jet-bomber).The racial and moral superiority engendered for the Israelis by "Nazi Holocaust" propaganda is the reason why the massacre at Qana in 1996 was forgotten, allowing it to happen all over again in 2006."Never again"? Ha!"Never Again" does not apply when it comes to Israeli extermination of the people of Lebanon, according to an exact Zionist timetable that brooks no "ceasefire." The Israelis will cease fire when every Lebanese woman and child they intend to slaughter is properly dead and buried, and not before. And the "Nazi Holocaust"-saturated human rights campaigners will sit on their hands, exactly as they have been trained to do by Spielberg and Wiesel, and a parade of professors and preachers. Tears, guilt, classroom curricula, movies and museums are reserved for the victims of the Nazis. Cluster bombs, napalm, missiles and cannon shells are reserved for helpless Arab mothers and their children, with applause from Hillary, Elie and four hundred members of the House of Representatives.This, in part, is why I am a "Holocaust" revisionist. As sanctimony, "The Holocaust" exceeds the Pharisees in bloated hypocrisy, and as a prop for Israeli mass murder, it is a bloodthirsty alibi for arrogant Zionist supremacy and mass murder.

An Israeli air raid on the Lebanese village of Qana which killed at least 56 civilians was the result of indiscriminate Israeli bombing which amounts to a war crime, Human Rights Watch said. The New York-based rights group said Sunday's strike on Qana which killed 37 children suggested the Israeli military was treating southern Lebanon as "a free-fire zone.""The Israeli military seems to consider anyone left in the area a combatant who is fair game for attack," Human Rights Executive Director Kenneth Roth said in a statement. "(The Qana attack) is the latest product of an indiscriminate bombing campaign that the Israel Defense Forces have waged in Lebanon", the statement said. "Indiscriminate bombing in Lebanon (is) a war crime," read the statement's headline.Israel says it warned civilians to leave southern Lebanon, where it says it has been targeting Hizbollah guerrillas. But the Lebanese government says Israeli bombardment of roads and cars made it impossible for people to escape...Human Rights Watch said responsibility for Qana rested "squarely with the Israeli military”.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

ABC television network, has a development deal with Mel Gibson's company to make a miniseries about the Holocaust...the Holocaust project, to be adapted from a little-known 1998 memoir called "Flory: Survival in the Valley of Death," which recounts the experiences of a young Dutch Jew during World War II, is in the early stages. An ABC spokeswoman Sunday would confirm only that the project was in development... Gibson and his spokesman, Alan Nierob, have said little about the project, which is backed by Gibson's Con Artists Productions, the TV division of his Icon Productions. [Los Angeles Times, July 31, 2006]

(CNN) -- Mel Gibson's statement regarding his arrest Friday on suspicion of DUI: After drinking alcohol on Thursday night, I did a number of things that were very wrong and for which I am ashamed. I drove a car when I should not have, and was stopped by the LA County Sheriffs. The arresting officer was just doing his job and I feel fortunate that I was apprehended before I caused injury to any other person.

I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable. I am deeply ashamed of everything I said, and I apologize to anyone who I have offended. Also, I take this opportunity to apologize to the deputies involved for my belligerent behavior. They have always been there for me in my community and indeed probably saved me from myself. I disgraced myself and my family with my behavior and for that I am truly sorry.

I have battled with the disease of alcoholism for all of my adult life and profoundly regret my horrific relapse. I apologize for any behavior unbecoming of me in my inebriated state and have already taken necessary steps to ensure my return to health.

Much has been made in the U.S. media of the Syrian and Iranian-origin weaponry used by Hezbollah in the escalating violence in Israel and Lebanon. There has been no parallel discussion of the origin of Israel's weaponry, the vast bulk of which is from the United States.The United States is the primary source of Israel's far superior arsenal. For more than 30 years, Israel had been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance and since 1985 Jerusalem has received about $3 billion in military and economic aid each year from Washington. U.S. aid accounts for more than 20% of Israel's total defense budget.Over the past decade, the United States has transferred more than $17 billion in military aid to this country of just under 7 million people.Israel is one of the United States' largest arms importers. Between 1996 and 2005 (the last year for which full data is available), Israel took delivery of $10.19 billion in U.S. weaponry and military equipment, including more than $8.58 billion through the Foreign Military Sales program, and another $1.61 billion in Direct Commercial SalesDuring the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005, Israel received $10.5 billion in Foreign Military Financing—the Pentagon's biggest military aid program—and $6.3 billion in U.S. arms deliveries. The aid figure is larger than the arms transfer figure because it includes financing for major arms agreements for which the equipment has yet to be fully delivered. The most prominent of these deals is a $4.5 billion sale of 102 Lockheed Martin F-16s to Israel.

Israel army Sergeant Rafael Ezra has little sympathy for Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli attacks. "I think they need to choose better where they live," he said.

NEAR THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER - Rafael Ezra's artillery is pounding unseen targets miles away with blast after deafening blast. But the 21-year-old Israeli soldier isn't too concerned about whether the shells are killing Hezbollah fighters or innocent civilians. "Most of the people killed in Lebanon lived in Hezbollah neighborhoods," Ezra said while getting his hair shaved and listening to Arabic music as shells soared over a nearby hillside. "So I think they need to choose better where they live. People should know better."Few Israelis, however, are shedding many tears for the civilians dying in Lebanon or wondering whether their country's tactics might make it harder rather than easier to reach a peace that would last longer than a few weeks or months.The latest conflict with Hezbollah has united Israel...public support for the military action remains above 80 percent...three-quarters of Israelis in one recent poll urged their country to go further."I am prepared to hail down hellfire...their innocent bystanders can die instead of ours," Rafi Ginat, the editor of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest newspaper, wrote in Friday's edition. "We are in the middle of a war...We have to strike hard - and we can allow ourselves to feel good about it."Earlier this week, an Israeli airstrike hit a United Nations base, killing four unarmed peacekeepers. Eight Canadian citizens were killed last week as they tried to escape the attacks. Dozens of Lebanese citizens have been killed when Israeli planes hit convoys of civilians heeding Israeli warnings for them to leave their homes.Israeli officials generally say they're sorry after such attacks. But their statements usually come with a "but"...Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert...recently complained that the world was getting a "distorted picture in which the victim is portrayed as the aggressor."

Thursday, July 27, 2006

With more than 400 Lebanese civilians killed in recent weeks, the United Nations and leading human rights organizations are stepping up their criticism of Israel, suggesting Jerusalem could face legal consequences for its military actions. Even before four U.N. observers were killed in an Israeli strike Tuesday, senior officials from the world body were warning Israel ...may have violated international law and committed war crimes. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told the Forward that it was "quite possible" that Israeli soldiers or commanders could face war crimes charges for attacking civilian objects, firing indiscriminately in civilian areas or taking inadequate precautions to avoid civilian causalities. The warnings drew harsh rebukes from Israel and its supporters. Israel insists that its military actions constitute a "proportionate" response to the threat posed by Hezbollah and that the civilian casualties are largely due to the fact that the Shiite militia is deliberately hiding its operatives and weaponry in civilian areas. As part of its effort to fend off the mounting criticism, Israel sent Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to Europe this week. Jan Egeland, the top U.N. humanitarian affairs official, did condemn Hezbollah fighters this week for situating themselves among women and children. But that comment was seen by some observers as an attempt to balance Egeland's assertion a day earlier that Israel had conducted "disproportionate" strikes against civilians. On Sunday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour told CNN that Israel's actions in Lebanon could lead to the prosecution of its military commanders. ..Arbour said last week saying that senior civilian and military officials could be brought to justice. "The scale of the killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control," she said. Her comments prompted a vivid rebuke from Israel's ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who penned an opinion article titled "Arbour Must Go" in the National Post. The already simmering tensions between Israel and the U.N. exploded Tuesday, after Israel dropped a bomb on a U.N. outpost in south Lebanon, killing four observers. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan quickly accused Jerusalem of intentionally targeting the outpost — an allegation that Israeli officials angrily denied, insisting the incident was not deliberate. ...Human Rights Watch also alleged that Israel may be guilty of war crimes. Roth pointed to the destruction of about 60% of a nine square blocks area of southern Beirut composed mostly of apartment buildings and the extensive damage to its infrastructure. He also cited Israeli attacks on the village of Srifa, in which 10 houses were destroyed and at least 42 civilians killed, and on a vehicle of villagers fleeing Marwaheen, in which 16 civilians were killed, which took place despite the alleged absence of legitimate military target in sight. The venue for such prosecutions could be national courts under universal jurisdiction statutes or the recently created International Criminal Court, which has worldwide jurisdiction for war crimes. Lebanon has yet to ratify the treaty and Israel is not a signatory, which means the court could only become involved if the U.N. Security Council refers the matter — an unlikely prospect — or if Lebanon invites the court in to investigate. ...Human Rights Watch lobbed more accusations at Israel in a statement claiming that Israeli forces were using artillery-fired cluster munitions in populated areas of Lebanon, a possible violation of the prohibition under international law against indiscriminate attacks. The Israeli military counters that the use of such weaponry is legal under international law. Human Rights Watch said its investigators confirmed that a cluster munitions attack on the village of Blida on July 19 had killed one and wounded at least 12 civilians, including seven children, and that they had photographed such munitions in the arsenal of Israeli military artillery teams stationed on the Israeli-Lebanese border during a visit four days later. Roth said that such munitions were inaccurate and their high failure rate caused further danger to civilians. He told the Forward that the organization was reviewing additional pictures showing different types of cluster munitions being deployed by Israeli artillery teams. Israel and Human Rights Watch have been at loggerheads over their contradictory account of an incident last month in Gaza, during which a Palestinian family was killed. While the Israeli military has maintained that its artillery shelling did not cause the deaths and refused an independent investigation, Human Rights Watch has claimed that the facts are murkier and that an impartial probe is needed. ...In addition, Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and doctors in hospitals in southern Lebanon said this week that they suspected some of the wounds sustained by civilians were caused by phosphorous bombs. The Geneva Conventions ban the use of white phosphorous as an incendiary weapon against civilian populations and in air attacks against military forces in civilian areas.Israel says that it is investigating the incidents and a military spokeswoman was quoted by Reuters as saying that the weapons used by the army in Lebanon did not contravene international norms. Amnesty International, for its part, has denounced "blatant" violations of international law and called on the U.N. to deploy an immediate fact-finding mission to investigate attacks against civilians and other breaches of international law.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

At the meeting in Rome, while the other nations pressed for an immediate cease-fire, the United States argued for a “sustainable cease-fire”...The lack of action prompted Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon to lash out with a cry of despair. “Is the value of human life less in Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere?” Mr. Siniora asked. “Are we children of a lesser God?”Accusing Israelis of “barbaric destruction,” he vowed to seek justice, announcing that Lebanon will begin legal proceedings for war reparations. European and Arab governments, as well as Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, and Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, lined up behind him and pushed hard for an immediate cessation of hostilities or even a truce on humanitarian grounds, several participants said.But in a tense, sometimes stormy debate that went on for nearly an hour, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dug in, and prevailed. Later, she defended the United States’ refusal to call for an immediate cease-fire, saying: “It doesn’t do anyone any good to raise false hopes about something that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen."

*...Israeli officials said they regarded the failure of an international conference to reach agreement on a cease-fire plan as clearing the way for further assaults.... “We received yesterday at the Rome conference permission from the world,’’ Justice Minister Haim Ramon told Israeli radio, “to continue this operation, this war..."

Human Rights Watch charged earlier this week that Israel had used cluster munitions on the Lebanese village of Blida on July 19, killing one woman and wounding at least 12 other civilians, including seven children...The munitions disperse bomblets over a wide area and have been banned by some countries because of the high number of civilian casualties that they cause....

But Israel says the weapons it uses are allowed under international law...[an Israeli] general acknowledged that Israel had used cluster munitions in the conflict...“We try to minimize their use,” Major General Benny Gantz, who is in charge of the Israeli military’s ground forces, said. “We only use them in designated areas..."

NY Times July 26 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/world/middleeast/26cnd-lebanon.html

The aftermath of the Israeli terror bombing at Khiyam, in which four U.N. observers were killed.

The last thing the Israelis want are witnesses.

Airstrike Hits U.N. Post in Lebanon

Washington Post | July 25, 2006; 6:50 PM

JERUSALEM, July 25 -- An Israeli air and artillery attack hit a United Nations observation post near the Israel-Lebanon border Tuesday, killing four members of a U.N. peacekeeping force, U.N. officials announced. The bomb struck a post in Khiyam, near the eastern end of the border with Israel, manned by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, U.N. spokesperson Marie Okabe said.UNIFIL spokesman Milos Struger said in Lebanon Tuesday that Israeli forces continued firing close to the U.N. post even during a rescue operation. Since the conflict began, he said, a civilian employee of UNIFIL and his wife have also been killed, and five UNIFIL soldiers and one military observer have been wounded. A senior State Department official said Israel had informed the Bush administration that the attack on the U.N. post was an accident. "It was a terrible tragedy," said the senior official, traveling with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "We have heard from the Israelis that it was an accident."

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UN: OBSERVERS MADE MANY CALLS BEFORE STRIKE

CNN | July 26, 2006 1223 GMT

BEIRUT, Lebanon (CNN) -- The U.N. observers killed when an Israeli bomb hit their bunker in Lebanon Tuesday called an Israeli military liaison about 10 times in the six hours before they died to warn that aerial attacks were getting close to their position, a U.N. officer said. After each call, the Israeli officer promised to have the bombing stopped, an officer at the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) base in Noqoura said. Finally, an Israeli bomb exploded directly on the U.N. post near Khiyam, killing four U.N. observers from Austria, Finland, Canada and China, the U.N. officer said.As of Wednesday morning (July 26), three of the four bodies had been recovered from the rubble, an officer at the UNIFIL base in Noqoura said. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said the incident would be "thoroughly investigated" and that the Israeli military had taken measures since the start of its bombardment of southern Lebanon to protect the U.N. observers there. "Israel would never deliberately target U.N. personnel," Mark Regev said. According to Regev, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called U.N.Secretary-General Kofi Annan and "expressed his regret at this tragedy in Lebanon."Annan issued a sharply worded statement Tuesday evening which said he was "shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting ... of a U.N. observer post in southern Lebanon." He called on Israel to conduct "a full investigation into this very disturbing incident.""This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long established and clearly marked U.N. post at Khiyam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that U.N. positions would be spared Israeli fire," Annan said."Furthermore, General Alain Pelligrini, the U.N. force commander in south Lebanon, had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout the day on Tuesday, stressing the need to protect that particular U.N. position from attack."The timeline provided CNN by a U.N. officer in Lebanon showed the first bomb exploded about 200 yards from the U.N. outpost at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday, prompting the first call by the UNIFIL observers to their designated contact with the Israeli military. The officer said they were assured by the Israeli liaison that he would stop the attacks. A series of about nine more bombs hit within 100 to 400 yards from the observers over the next several hours, with a call to the Israeli military following each explosion. The U.N. base at Noqoura lost contact with the outpost at 7:40 p.m., apparently the time of the direct hit, the officer said.

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ISRAELI TROOPS 'IGNORED' UN PLEA

BBC News | July 26, 2006 12:56:36 GMT

UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon contacted Israeli troops 10 times before an Israeli bomb killed four of them, an initial UN report says. The post was hit by a precision-guided missile after six hours of shelling nearby, diplomats familiar with the initial probe into the deaths say....The four unarmed UN observers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, died after their UN post was hit by an Israeli air strike on Tuesday. The UN report says each time the UN contacted Israeli forces, they were assured the firing would stop.

Israel is conducting an investigation into the deaths, and has rejected accusations made by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that the targeting of the UN position was "apparently deliberate".

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IRISH OFFICER WARNED ISRAEL ON THREAT TO UN STAFF

DUBLIN, July 26 (Reuters) - An Irish army officer in south Lebanon warned the Israeli military six times that their attacks in the area were putting the lives of U.N. observers at risk, Ireland's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday. Four U.N. observers were killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. "On six separate occasions he was in contact with the Israelis to warn them that their bombardment was endangering the lives of U.N. staff in South Lebanon," a Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman said. "He warned: 'You have to address this problem or lives may be lost'," the spokesman said of comments by a senior Irish soldier working as a liaison officer between U.N. forces in South Lebanon and the Israelis.

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"THE SHELLING OF THE UN POSITIONS BEGAN EARLY IN THE MORNING AND CARRIED ON ALL DAY"

“Mr. Olmert definitely believes it was a mistake,” said Mr. Annan, referring to Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert. But despite at least 10 calls from United Nations personnel to Israel that their positions were being shelled, Mr. Annan added, “The shelling of the U.N. positions began early in the morning and carried on all day.”

NY Times July 26 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/world/middleeast/26cnd-lebanon.html

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Other Israeli "Accidents"

ATTACK ON THE USS LIBERTY IN 1967A clearly marked US intelligence vessel was attacked for hours by Israeli war planes and war ships. The surviving American sailors were sworn to secrecy concerning the "accidental" Israeli attack. MASSACRE IN UN REFUGEE CAMP IN 1996During an Israeli offensive against Lebanon in 1996, Israeli artillery blasted a U.N. refugee camp at Qana in southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 civilians who had sought sanctuary with UN peacekeepers. It was a deliberate Israeli massacre of Arab women and children which went--as usual--unpunished, having no impact whatsoever on the unstinting flow of US taxpayer cash to the Israeli killers, and of course no prosecution for a war crime. The Israelis claimed the massacre was an "accident."--M. Hoffman IIBOMBINGS OF PALESTINIAN CIVILIANS 2000-2006There have been dozens of mass killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces. Almost of all of these are explained away as "accidents...mistaken identity, stray cannon fire, stray missiles."

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

This week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show, pitted against David Horowitz, a “Semite supremacist” who most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and feelings like the rest of us.It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States on Middle East matters... But five minutes of listening to Horowitz speak, and the sympathy with which his arguments were greeted by Laura (“The Professors -- your book’s a great read, David”), left me a lot more frightened about the world’s future.Horowitz’s response to every question, every development in the Middle East, whether it concerns Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria or Iran, is the same: “They want to drive the Jews into the sea”. It’s as simple as that. Not even a superficial attempt at analysis; just the message that the Arab world is trying to finish off the genocide started by Europe. And if Laura is any yardstick, a lot of Americans buy that stuff.Horowitz is keen to bang the square peg of the Lebanon story into the round hole of his claims that the “Jews” are facing an imminent genocide in the Middle East. And to help him, he and the massed ranks of US apologists for Israel -- regulars, I suspect, of shows like Laura’s -- are promoting at least four myths regarding Hizbullah’s current rockets strikes on Israel.

Unless they are challenged at every turn, the danger is that they will win the ground war against common sense in the US

The first myth is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its military hardware because Hizbullah began “raining down” rockets on the Galilee. Anyone with a short memory can probably recall that was not the first justification we were offered: that had to do with the two soldiers captured by Hizbullah on a border post on July 12.

But presumably Horowitz and his friends realised that 400 Lebanese dead and counting in little more than a week was hard to sell as a “proportionate” response. In any case Hizbullah kept telling the world how keen it was to return the soldiers in a prisoner swap.

Hundreds of dead in Lebanon, at least 1,000 severely injured and more than half a million refugees -- all because Israel is not ready to sit down at the negotiating table. Even Horowitz could not “advocate for Israel” on that one.

So the chronology of war has been reorganised: now we are being told that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the barrage of Hizbullah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. The international community is buying the argument hook, line and sinker. “Israel has the right to defend itself”, says every politician who can find a microphone to talk into.

But, if we cast our minds back, that is not how the “Middle East crisis”, as TV channels now describe it, started. It is worth recapping on those early events (and I won’t document the long history of Lebanese suffering at Israel’s hands that preceded it) before they become entirely shrouded in the mythology being peddled by Horowitz and others.

Early on July 12 Hizbullah launched a raid against an army border post, in what was in the best interpretation a foolhardy violation of Israeli sovereignty. In the fighting the Shiite militia killed three soldiers and captured two others, while Hizbullah fired a few mortars at border areas in what the Israeli army described at the time as “diversionary tactics”. As a result of the shelling, five Israelis were “lightly injured”, with most needing treatment for shock, according to the Haaretz newspaper.

Israel’s immediate response was to send a tank into Lebanon in pursuit of the Hizbullah fighters (its own foolhardy violation of Lebanese sovereignty). The tank ran over a landmine, which exploded killing four soldiers inside. Another soldier died in further clashes inside Lebanon as his unit tried to retrieve the bodies.

Rather than open diplomatic channels to calm the violence down and start the process of getting its soldiers back, Israel launched bombing raids deep into Lebanese territory the same day. Given Israel’s worldview that it alone has a right to project power and fear, that might have been expected.

But the next day Israel continued its rampage across the south and into Beirut, where the airport, roads, bridges, and power stations were pummelled. We now know from reports in the US media that the Israeli army had been planning such a strike against Lebanon for at least a year.

In contrast to the image of Hizbullah frothing at the mouth to destroy Israel, its leader Hassan Nasrallah held off from serious retaliation. For the first day and a half, he limited his strikes to the northern borders areas, which have faced Hizbullah attacks in the past and are well protected.

He waited till late on June 13 before turning his guns on Haifa, even though we now know he could have targeted Israel’s third largest city from the outset. A small volley of rockets directed at Haifa caused no injuries and looked more like a warning than an escalation.

It was another three days -- days of constant Israeli bombardmeent of Lebanon, destroying the country and injuring countless civilians -- before Nasrallah hit Haifa again, including a shell that killed eight workers in a railway depot.

No one should have been surprised. Nasrallah was doing exactly what he had threatened to do if Israel refused to negotiate and chose the path of war instead. Although the international media quoted his ominous televised message that “Haifa is just the beginning”, Nasrallah in fact made his threat conditional on Israel’s continuing strikes against Lebanon. In the same speech he warned: “As long as the enemy pursues its aggression without limits and red lines, we will pursue the confrontation without limits and red lines.” Well, Israel did, and so now has Nasrallah.

The second myth is that Hizbullah’s stockpile of 12,000 rockets -- the Israeli army’s estimate -- poses an existential threat to Israel. According to Horowitz and others, Hizbullah collected its armoury with the sole intent of destroying the Jewish state.

If this really was Hizbullah’s intention in amassing the weapons, it has a very deluded view of what is required to wipe Israel off the map. More likely, it collected the armoury in the hope that it might prove a deterrence -- even if a very inadequate one, as Lebanon is now discovering -- against a repeat of Israel’s invasions of 1978 and 1982, and the occupation that lasted nearly two decades afterwards.

In fact, according to other figures supplied by the Israeli army, at least 2,000 Hizbullah rockets have already been fired into Israel while the army’s bombardments have so far destroyed a further 2,000 rockets. In other words, northern Israel has already received a fifth of Hizbullah’s arsenal. As someone living in the north, and within range of the rockets, I have to say Israel does not look close to being expunged. The Galilee may be emptier, as up to third of Israeli Jews seek temporary refuge in the south, but Israel’s existence is in no doubt at all.

The third myth is that, while Israel is trying to fight a clean war by targeting only terrorists, Hizbullah prefers to bring death and destruction on innocents by firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

It is amazing that this myth even needs exploding, but after the efforts of Horowitz and co it most certainly does. As the civilian death toll in Lebanon has rocketed, international criticism of Israel has remained at the mealy-mouthed level of diplomatic requests for “restraint” and “proportionate responses”.

One need only cast a quick eye over the casualty figures from this conflict to see that if Israel is targeting only Hizbullah fighters it has been making disastrous miscalculations. So far some 400 Lebanese civilians are reported dead -- unfortunately for Horowitz’s story at least a third of them children. From the images coming out of Lebanon’s hospitals, many more children have survived but with terrible burns or disabling injuries.

The best estimates, though no one knows for sure, are that Hizbullah deaths are not yet close to the three-figures range.

In the latest emerging news from Lebanon, human rights groups are accusing Israel of violating international law and using cluster grenades, which kill indiscriminately. There are reports too, so far unconfirmed, that Israel has been firing illegal incendiary bombs.

Conversely, the breakdown of the smaller number of deaths of Israelis at the hands of Hizbullah -- 42 at the time of writing -- show that more soldiers have been killed than civilians.

In fact, although no one is making the point, Hizbullah’s rockets have been targeted overwhelming at strategic locations: the northern economic hub of Haifa, its satellite towns and the array of military sites across the Galilee.

Nasrallah seems fully aware that Israel has an impressive civil defence program of shelters that keep most civilians out of harm’s way. Unlike Horowitz I won’t presume to read Nasrallah’s mind: whether he wants to kill large numbers of Israeli civilians or not cannot be known, given his inability to do so.

But we can see from the choice of the sites he is striking that his primary goal is to give Israelis a small taste of the disruption of normal life that is being endured by the Lebanese. He has effectively closed Haifa for more than a week, shutting its port and financial centres. Israeli TV is speaking increasingly of the damage being inflicted on the country’s economy.

Because of Israel’s press censorship laws, it is impossible to discuss the locations of Israel’s military installations. But Hizbullah’s rockets are accurate enough to show that many are intended for the army’s sites in the Galilee, even if they are rarely precise enough to hit them.

It is obvious to everyone in Nazareth, for example, that the rockets landing close by, and once on, the city over the past week are searching out, and some have fallen extremely close to, the weapons factory sited near us.

Hizbullah seems to have as little concern for the collateral damage of civilian deaths as Israel -- each wants the balance of terror in its favour -- but it is nonsense to suggest that Hizbullah’s goals are any more ignoble than Israel’s. It is trying to dent the economy of northern Israel in retaliation for Israel’s total destruction of the Lebanese economy. Equally, it is trying to show Israel that it knows where its military installations are to be found. Both strategies appear to be having an impact, even if a minor one, on weakening Israeli resolve.

The fourth myth is a continuation of the third: Hizbullah has been endangering the lives of ordinary Lebanese by hiding among non-combatants.

We have seen this kind of dissembling by Israel and Horowitz before, though not repeated so enthusiastically by Western officials. The UN head of humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, who is in the region, accused Hizbullah of “cowardly blending” among the civilian population, and a similar accuation was levelled by the British foreign minister Kim Howells when he arrived in Israel.

In 2002 Israel made the same charge: that Palestinians resisting its army’s rampage through the refugee camps of the West Bank were hiding among civilians. The claim grew louder as more Palestinian civilians showed the irritating habit of gettting in the way of Israeli strikes against population centres. The complaints reached a crescendo when at least two dozen civilians were killed in Jenin as Israel razed the camp with Apache helicopters and Caterpillar bulldozers.

The implication of Egeland’s cowardly statement seems to be that any Lebanese fighter, or Palestinian one, resisting Israel and its powerful military should stand in an open field, his rifle raised to the sky, waiting to see who fares worse in a shoot-out with an Apache helicopter or F-16 fighter jet. Hizbullah’s reluctance to conduct the war in this manner, we are supposed to infer, is proof that they are terrorists.

Egeland and Howells need reminding that Hizbullah’s fighters are not aliens recently arrived from training camps in Iran, whatever Horowitz claims. They belong to and are strongly supported by the Shiite community, nearly half the country’s population, and many other Lebanese. They have families, friends and neighbours living alongside them in the country’s south and the neighbourhoods of Beirut who believe Hizbullah is the best hope of defending their country from Israel’s regular onslaughts.

Given the indigenous nature of Hizbullah’s resistance, we should not be surprised at the lengths the Shiite militia is going to ensure their loved ones, and the Lebanese people more generally, are not put directly in danger by their combat.

If only the same could be said of the Israeli army and airforce. One need only look at the images of the victims of its strikes against residential neighbourhoods, car, ambulances and factories to see why most of the dead being extracted from the rubble are civilians.

And finally, there is a fifth myth I almost forgot to mention. That people like David Horowitz only want to tell us the truth…

“Mitzvah tanks,” the brightly painted minivans operated by adherents to the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of Hasidic Judaism, arrived at the junction in the afternoon, broadcasting a sort of Hasidic disco. Their passengers, young men in Hasidic dress with wildly flowing sidelocks, spilled out of the vans dancing and singing, some leaping onto the tanks.

“We’re here to entertain the troops,” a man with a footlong beard shouted from atop one of the vans. Another group handed out white knit skullcaps bearing the words “Nachman of Uman” in blue Hebrew letters, a reference to Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the founder of another Hasidic branch. “They protect the soldiers’ lives,” one of the Nachman followers said of the caps...

Cf. NY Times, July 25, 2006, "The Front Line: A New Generation of Israeli Soldiers Confronts the Unknown Across the Lebanon Border”